We were a little shocked when New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently used the tragic shooting in Aurora Colorado to make a case for more stringent gun control laws. Rather than allowing a time to mourn the senseless violence, Bloomberg saw political opportunity to expand his Second Amendment infringements.

On February 27th, a student opened fire in a cafeteria at Chardon High School in Ohio, killing three students and injuring two others before being arrested.

Less than two hours after the shooting, Columbus Mayor Michael Coleman was conspiring with individuals from Mayor Bloomberg’s office to push an agenda involving limitations to the Second Amendment.

At 9:02 AM on February 27, 2012 – less than two hours after T.J. Lane allegedly shot five of his classmates in the cafeteria of their Chardon, Ohio school – lobbyist Mark Glaze, the national director of MAIG, emailed Coleman staffer R. Lee Roberts and three employees in Mayor Bloomberg’s office to inform them of the news.

At 10:04 AM Bret Thompson, policy director for union-funded liberal group ProgressOhio, forwarded a link to a Huffington Post story about the shooting to Roberts, NYC “Special Counsel for Firearms Policy” Chris Kocher, Fund for a Safer Future director Lance Orchid, the executive director of the Ohio Coalition Against Gun Violence, and a fellow ProgressOhio staffer. Orchid replied that the recipients’ previously scheduled 10:30 AM conference call should focus on using the Chardon shooting to advance an anti-gun narrative in Ohio.

“I hope that we can do some rapid response,” Orchid wrote. “Perhaps this is the perfect time to push out the new micro­site petition around guns on campus.”

In a separate email to Thompson, Janey Rountree, Bloomberg’s “Firearms Policy Coordinator,” wrote, “I’m not necessarily opposed to trying to connect the two for messaging purposes – just want to make sure we have our facts straight. In the meantime, I totally agree that today is a good time for condolence page.”

MAIG (Mayors Against Illegal Guns) is a gun-control lobbying group co-founded by Mayor Bloomberg. Bloomberg’s office and a progressive group in Ohio actually created and used the aforementioned condolences page to harvest e-mail addresses that were then distributed to MAIG and another gun control organization in Ohio.

The following afternoon, Chris Kocher sent an email from Bloomberg’s office outlining the response to the Chardon shootings. Kocher noted that ProgressOhio had “Created rememberingchardon.com webpage; will send email directing list to that page and ask them to offer condolences.” Kocher added, “New email acquisitions will be shared with Mayors Against Illegal Guns and a small subset of these names will be shared with OCSGV [Ohio Coalition Against Gun Violence].”

“This is great, Chris,” Orchid replied.

This is far from ‘great’. It is a deplorable extension of the concept of ‘never letting a crisis go to waste’.

There is no event, no matter how tragic, that Bloomberg will not try to exploit for political gain.